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On today's episode of Loud & Clear, Brian Becker and John Kiriakou are joined by Sputnik News analysts and producers Walter Smolarek and Nicole Roussell.


Friday is Loud & Clear’s weekly hour-long segment The Week in Review, about the week in politics, policy, and international affairs. Today they focus on Trump’s reversal in his approach to the pandemic, the latest US moves and escalation of rhetoric against China, the federal police crackdown on anti-racism protesters, the 2020 presidential election, and more.



Today, China ordered the closure of the US consulate in Chengdu, in response to the Trump Administration’s closure of China’s consulate in Houston, Texas, for which they cited alleged Chinese theft of US intellectual property. The move was a serious escalation in the tit-for-tat between the US and China. KJ Noh, a peace activist and scholar on the geopolitics of Asia, and a frequent contributor to Counterpunch and Dissident Voice, joins the show.



President Trump said yesterday that he would send federal agents into Chicago, Albuquerque, and Kansas City as part of what he’s calling “Operation Legend.” In Portland, these agents of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Customs and Border Protection, and the Bureau of Prisons, have harassed peaceful protestors, they’ve snatched demonstrators off the streets into unmarked rental cars, and they’ve detained protestors without charge. Mayors and governors are up in arms, and they’ve filed multiple lawsuits against the administration. But the president is undaunted. Brian and John speak with Wyatt Reed, the producer of By Any Means Necessary, which is on Radio Sputnik every weekday from 2pm to 4pm.



It’s Friday! So it’s time for the week’s worst and most misleading headlines. Brian and John speak with Steve Patt, an independent journalist whose critiques of the mainstream media have been a feature of his site Left I on the News and on twitter @leftiblog, and Sputnik producer Nicole Roussell.



The corporate media make a lot of the work being done internationally by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. We routinely see news reports about the Foundation’s involvement in the development of a vaccine for Covid-19, for example. But the Gates Foundation is leading the charge in privatizing global public health policy. Michele Greenstein, a journalist and the author of “Why the Bill Gates Global Health Empire Promises More Empire and Less Public Health,” at The Grayzone, and the producer of a series on the technology war between the U.S. and China and a documentary from the field on 2019’s anti-government movement in Hong Kong.